kernel compile more than once panics the penguin (and me)
 

I've been messing around recompiling the kernel but I'm still missing a piece in my understanding so if anyone could enlighten:

At first if I download the source and recompile on a clean install and then do make modules, modules_install part, alot of the modules are missing and can't be loaded, where did they go? Were they even there ?:) If I rename

/lib/modules/<kernel_version>
to
/lib/modules/<kernel_version>.old

this seems to help.

If I recompile more than once everything goes belly-up and when I reboot the poor fellow has a panic and refuses to go on.

Message is something like "kernel Panic VFS can't find (0300) add the line root=/ " or something like that (not very specific I know :( ) At first I thought it was cos I left out VFS in the file systems but it does the same with it in and lilo seems to be updated okay by make install.

What is the exact relation to modules and where they end up/fit in location wise when you're compiling the kernel?

It's the everything going pear-shaped if I recompile more than once that's bugging me more as I am obviously missing out something that's related. I've been doing the normal compile routine from the up the top of this forum

make mrproper (depending)
make menuconfig
make bzImage
make
make install
make modules
make modules_install

(kernel panic :) )

I need enlightenment as I really want to understand what's going wrong as I consider it quite fundamental to my understanding of the bigger picture, so if I'm making any sense let me know what you think.

Follow this thread closely and you shouldn't have any problems compiling your kernel on Slackware.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=49035

Uhh, according to the Slackware essentials book,

make mrproper(brings kernel to it's base state)
make menuconfig
make clean
make deps
make bzImage
make modules
then in /boot you re-name system.map and vmlinuz to system.map.old and vmlinuz.old and copy the new files from /usr/src/linux to /boot
you don't have to do a make modules_install

You have to be sure that the kernel-modules and the kernel-ide and the kernel-headers packages are installed!! this is a must

Yup, that seems to be what was causing me problems, the make install - compiled 2.4.22, copied/altered everything manually, edited lilo and shebang the penguin stopped flapping.

A lesson learned the hard way, indeed :)